Every Time
by tempus terere
Summary: You don't get to fall in love with the same girl twice and get away with it. — RingabelEdea


**Notes:** Why does this keep happening to my OTPs? What did I do in my past life to deserve this?  
**Warning:** Spoilers for the end.

* * *

Grandship, Ringabel discovered very quickly, was ideal for adventurers and refugees, for people without a home to return to like himself. Contrary to the many rumors he liked to shroud himself in, Ringabel was neither. The ship's frequenters often tried to pry out why he was here, all alone at sea. A part-time freelancer and full-time skirt-chaser, Ringabel was used to excessive interrogations and never answered any of their questions. Not truthfully, anyway.

Upon his decision to stay, he had hoped Grandship, with her aching planks and queer clientele, would provide enough entertainment to keep him occupied, but, as it turned out, he'd overestimated her magnetism for the extraordinary. Time on deck went by idly and without purpose as if the rotation of night and day was more of a habit of the universe than anything else. This pattern only broke whenever Edea came to visit him for a few days to exchange the latest global news for colorful stories about feigned girlfriends from all sorts of exotic, non-existent places. Ringabel suspected she knew that he was lying to her but humored him anyway for a reason he hadn't quite figured out yet. Maybe she was simply a better person than he.

They never dwelled much on the past during her visits, partly because it hurt, but mostly because it amounted to nothing. There wasn't anything to be gained from it except the pain of the prospect that the four of them would never be able to spend time together as they had on their journey.

The sole time they did brush the matter was when Edea told him about Tiz. Ringabel hadn't been very shocked to hear he'd freed the celestial being from his mortal body. Tiz had always been selfless to a point where it wasn't just annoying but also hurtful. No doubt he had believed himself expendable whereas he'd thought the angel (or whatever deity it'd been that had resided in him) was not, so he decided to sacrifice himself, blissfully ignorant of the consequences.

"Agnès is devastated," Edea told him.

"I can imagine," he replied even though he tried not to. She had suffered enough for several lifetimes; they all had. The Great Chasm might have closed, but the holes inside them were still gaping wide. Now there was another one in the shape of Tiz.

"I can't believe he did that." Edea looked like she was on the verge of tears for the umpteenth time that evening. He couldn't blame her but wished she would refrain from it regardless. Tiz had done this out of his own free will, and that alone was proof enough for the sheer scope of his unknowing foolishness. Ringabel couldn't stand to see Edea suffer from it.

"Are you really that surprised?" he asked, trying to wash down the bile in his throat with a potent sip from his beer jug. Over time this had become his primary coping mechanism as the world and people outside changed until he didn't recognize them anymore. Sometimes he wondered if he ever had. After all, this wasn't _his_ world; that was already long gone.

Edea stopped crying. She looked exhausted. Defeated by her grief and anger, she sank down in her seat and murmured, "I wish you'd come back with me."

For a moment Ringabel thought his body had spontaneously short-circuited. He couldn't breathe, his ears felt plugged, and his vision had turned black. After a few seconds, however, he recovered.

The blood in his veins tingled unpleasantly. He hoped to hell and back that he'd misheard. "What?"

"I miss you," she said, and he knew right then that this was the punishment for everything he had been too weak to do.

"No," Ringabel croaked. It was the only coherent thought in his mind.

"'No'?" she echoed. "What do you mean, 'no'?" Her face was blotchy from crying, and her eyes were red and swollen, but she was beautiful, and he loved her like he had in the previous—in _his_—world. The thing was just that you don't get to fall in love with the same girl twice and get away with it.

In his head everything started to spin. "Please don't," he pleaded, the syllables fracturing at each guilty memory. "Don't do this to me."

"Ringabel?" He hated the way she said the word because it wasn't his name, but he felt more comfortable as "Ringabel" than he had being "Alternis Dim," and in the end he would be neither. What would they write on his gravestone? What did Edea call him in her stories about their adventures? How did she label him when she thought about him?

"This isn't fair, Edea," he said. He didn't say, "Everything is out of balance, and it's my fault." Couldn't say, "I want you so much I wish I had never gotten my memory back so I wouldn't remember that I've stripped myself of any right to love you, no matter which world I'm in." Would never say, "I hate how theatrical this all sounds, and I regret that I fell for you _again_, but I just can't stop it."

"What are you talking about?" She watched him worriedly, pityingly. Once more, he couldn't blame her.

"Never mind me, I was just lost in thought." The lie tasted sweet on his tongue. "I'll visit you next time, okay?"

She eyed him, skeptical. "You'd do that?"

"I'd do anything for you."


End file.
